Lots of us bloggers have been talking about ICHEP which is going on this week. I’m not attending the conference, although some of the work I’ve been doing is :).
Now I’ve been turning my attention back to my physics analysis. As of about a week ago we have 200 nb-1 (now closer to 300 nb-1) of data – which is about 1/50th of what I hope to get for an analysis.
I briefly mentioned that I’ll be doing a search in a previous post. Now I’d like to share a bit what this particle beast is. A leptoquark carries quantum numbers for both quarks and leptons. It would decay by generation such that it mixes families of quarks and leptons. So why do we think it exists? In a word: Symmetry.
Physicists love symmetry (and symmetry breaking :)). Symmetry in forces (like electricity and magnetism), symmetry in families and generations of particles, symmetries everywhere. Since the quarks and leptons in the Standard Model have the same family structure it seems like there should be something that ties them together, like leptoquarks.
Granted this is a bit of an oversimplification, theorists have put in lots of work into understanding how these particles work. And now I’m going to be looking for them.
I’ll be giving updates over the next few months explaining more about these particles over the coming weeks.
-Regina
